VIQR stands for VIetnamese Quoted-Readable, which is a convention to write Vietnamese letters using 7-bit ASCII. This convention arises from the need to exchange Vietnamese messages in 7-bit environments such as email or the soc.culture.vietnamese newsgroup in the Internet. For this reason VIQR is also known as Vietnet convention.
The Viet-Std Group formally
VIQR convention in 1992.
As an introduction, consider this message written in the VIQR convention:
To^i ye^u tie^'ng nu+o+'c to^i tu+` khi mo+'i ra ddo+`i\.
It can be seen that the intent is to represent Vietnamese diacritical marks (da^'u phu.) as ASCII characters that suggest the shape of the original accents or tonemarks.
According to the VIQR standard, the following characters are subject to interpretation as Vietnamese diacritical marks:
================================================================ Diacritic Char ASCII Code Da^'u Example ---------------------------------------------------------------- breve ( 0x28, left paren tra(ng ba(n khoa(n circumflex ^ 0x5E, caret mu~ ho^m nay horn + 0x2B, plus sign mo'c Qui Nho+n acute ' 0x27, apostrophe sa('c La'i Thie^u grave ` 0x60, backquote huye^`n Bi`nh Du+o+ng hook above ? 0x3F, question ho?i Thu? DDu+'c tilde ~ 0x7E, tilde nga~ di~ va~ng dot below . 0x2E, period na(.ng ho.c ta^.p ================================================================ In addition, dd stands for d bar and DD stands for D bar.
The VIQR standard specifies that a character is interpreted as a diacritic if and only if it can combine with the previous letter into a legal Vietnamese character. To prevent combination the character must be preceded by an escape character, which is usually the backslash ( \ ) character.
The complete VIQR standard specifies that a text stream is always tagged as being in Vietnamese mode, English mode, or Literal mode:
For complete information, please read the official Viet-Std report published in 1992 at
Updated: December 17, 2014 -- Viet-Std Group